Paper Cranes
by Azur.r
Summary: Cornered, alone and facing his executioner, Kaneki has no choice but to fight. To survive is to piece together the remnants of a life he never knew how to live.


**Paper Cranes**

**Summary:** Cornered, alone and facing his executioner, Kaneki has no choice but to fight. To survive is to piece together the remnants of a life he never knew how to live.

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><p><strong>Chapter 1<strong> - Carrion

Eyes roved the cavern where corpses grew from the ground, limbs were splayed like flower stems, and ghosts that he knew weren't real flickered at the edge of his vision. The scent of ozone hung in the air–a sharp stab to his brain–and electricity crackled faintly like the buzz of flies around death. A heady mix of despair and fear seared through him until he felt chilled to the bone and alight with an animalistic need to flee.

Standing amidst the carnage was a white death, pale as his weapon was the dark carmine of dried blood. He walked with slow deliberate strides that spread the gore beneath his feet and as he came forward, the harsh industrial lights brought his face into sharp contrast.

Kaneki stepped back–staggered forward, spiralled spears through his midsection suspending him an instant. He tore free, his side opening at the seams as his intestines uncoiled and spilled out of him in a waterfall of blood and rent flesh.

Their eyes met, and there was no light in the other's gaze nor regard in the straight set of his mouth. His expression was the barren wastelands of Antarctica, and in it, he saw no future.

It was the promise of a solitary death.

His visceral scream of pain was cut off with a gurgle as blood filled his mouth, the taste of copper pennies overwhelming his tongue.

Kaneki gagged, and his vision blurred. Pain streaking through his head in a constant beat. He clawed and dragged the stretch of his organs back into him–the remnants sliding precariously in the slow-closing cavity of his abdomen and threatening to slip between slick fingers–even as he slid away from the slash of another weapon coming from his periphery.

The other's speed was unnatural–abominable for a human–and he could barely follow the arc of attack.

A growing hunger gnawed at his thoughts, whittling away at his control, and the wounds were slow to close and seeping.

He was dying.

His terror spiked and coalesced as he watched with suddenly too much clarity the tip of a lance aim for his head.

It pierced him through the eye the next moment, and he howled–equal parts in indescribable pain and horror. His kagune involuntarily unfurled out of him, opening up like the legs of a spider, and grasped along the length of the weapon with tiny clawed approximations of deformed hands. They pulled, and the lance came free with a slick squelch.

Clarity slipped between the gaping hole in his head, and Kaneki launched himself at the man with an rumbling growl, kagune extending and razing the path before him.

His thoughts fractured further: colours bled into something incomprehensible, and the lines that held the outline of the world together crumbled, becoming the crooked, vermicular scrawl of children. Amongst this, an amorphous form in white and black, held only in mind by a deeply unfamiliar need.

To kill.

To survive.

To live.

The eight limbs sprouting from his lower back lashed out in tandem, flaying colours open and stripping consistency from structure. As they veered towards the shape, it moved and bobbed strangely in his vision, splintering further apart and coming together again.

He could feel all that he was melting, becoming as insensate and unintelligible as his perceptions, and the abstract of the thought that he could still understand between the burning voracity was as terrible as the concept of ceaseless solitude.

A crackling hiss crescendoed, and sharp, angular edges rushed to meet him.

His body jerked through the attack, dragged into the spaces of colour between by his kagune like a marionette with rusted joints.

He staggered to a stop.

Limbs coiled, split and filled his fragmented sight, spilling forth and contacting a solid surface–inanimate and _useless._

From the mass of his attack came talons–barbed and writhing like an animal in throes of death–and he tore into it, ravaging with the desperations of _one last chance._

He felt it give and grasped a living warmth–_food. _

Kaneki's kagune wrapped around it–consumed the whole of it in layers of limbs–and he felt it carve into him.

It stopped.

And he pounced upon it with a manic fervour.

»»»»»«««««

Kaneki stood in the centre of a bed of crushed flowers, the red petals scattered like confetti amidst blades of short grass, and he looked up to a pastel blue sky that held no sun. All was still, and moving forward, the red spider lilies bowed against the weight of his steps but made no sound.

He walked on in a daze.

There was no end in sight, and no words would leave his mouth, stuck in a throat he could not be sure of.

He drifted forward on a path that did not exist, and each glimpse back showed a pristine garden of proudly standing lilies. The only marks were those directly around his feet, and he wondered if he had moved at all.

If this was death, it held nothing but the representation of his metamorphosis and a reminder of all he'd lost.

Without knowing how long he had walked, he stopped mid step, foot mere inches from trampling a white lily whose petals curled outward and were near covered by the cluster red flowers choking it.

He brushed the other flowers aside carelessly, intent to uncover something that he couldn't believe was there. It curved up. The petals were moist and glistened with dew, and he finally noticed the scent of petrichor that permeated the air.

Kaneki grasped the bottom of the stem.

It snapped with the sound of a thunderclap, and he was leaning over his mother's working form.

A pile of thornless flowers sat on the table, and she did not acknowledge his presence.

"…"

Kaneki collapsed to his knees and clutched at the cotton fabric of his mother's sweater with his free hand, head hung low. He could not look directly at the back he knew more intimately than her face.

"…" Mouthing sentences that held no sound, he pleaded for her to stop, to turn, to look at him as she hadn't done in so long.

There was no pause to even indicate she heard him, and he kneeled frozen, his heart pounding loudly in his ears. The blood rushing to his he made him feel light-headed, and the moment seemed to loop endlessly.

In this place that might've been his afterlife, the only sounds came from the clamouring of thoughts in his head.

She was everything he had admired–had been–and all that he hated of himself.

He finally understood, faced with this facsimile that worked ceaselessly for others: his selfishness and hers were the product of their cowardice. The fear of loss and loneliness drove their actions and brought them to the edge of life.

The faces of his friends rose from the corners of his mind, and he remembered:

He had left to fight alone, so his friends could not leave him behind.

He hadn't considered what that choice had meant for them, only how it affected him.

Kaneki twirled the white flower between his fingers, realizing he did not deserve–or maybe didn't want–this single piece of his past self. There were only regrets looking back, and though he couldn't change who he had been, he could change who he was.

Loosening his hold, he picked himself up and rounded the low table.

Her head was bent over, hair shading her face from view, and what he could see of it was a blank canvas. She continued to trim.

He leaned forward, hand propped against the table, and slipped the lily into the hair above her ear.

Clutching the side of the open casket, he lifted his hand from her painted face where the white flower–one of many–framed her pale form in death. He turned startled, and his eyes came to rest on the the short form of his past.

The young boy stepped forward to stand beside him, clad in black and a bouquet clutched in the crook of an arm.

Bluebells wreathed a bundle of pale, violet shion and sweat peas, and the sum of their stems was wrapped in a deep green ribbon.

His counterpart regarded him with the wide eyes of youth, and his lips quirked up in a small smile that contradicted the gleam of lamentation in his gaze.

The bouquet was presented to him.

Kaneki tilted his head up to meet the eyes of his older, human self and gently cradled the bundle.

As the flowers left the hands of his mirror, he began to crumble into ash that coalesced into a rising tsunami of fluttering wings. The green and black of swallowtail butterflies filled his vision and devoured the whole of him and his surroundings.

His perception of this world disappeared.

_"Thank you."_

»»»»»«««««

Kaneki felt himself being shaken and heard the susurrous murmur of his name fall from a voice he'd only recently heard in delirium-induced hallucinations. Hide.

"Kaneki!"

His head felt heavy and eyelids cemented together. He forced his eyes open, and his vision was a red-tinged blur of double images that set his mind spinning. Groaning from the stiff ache in his bones, he could hear the muffled sound of his voice and feel something solid suffocating his face.

"Kaneki, wake up!" The voice grew louder, more insistent as it repeated itself.

Lifting a stiff hand to pry the object off, the bone-deep exhaustion in his body made itself as every part of him ached. Whatever mask it was detached with a quiet hiss and seemed to melt between his fingers.

The lights were a vivid laser to the eyes, and he blinked to get the dark spots out of his sight. As they focused, he could make out the outline of a person with bright blond hair.

"Hide…?" His voice lilted upward in question as he squinted.

"Hey." The voice breathed out.

The image resolved itself into the outline of his best friend, face slacked in relief and a smile lighting up his expression. A hand squeezed his shoulder reassuringly.

His thoughts were more lucid than they'd been for a while, and they raced with the possibilities: he knew this was real. It had to be.

Kaneki fought against his protesting body and launched himself at Hide with an inarticulate exclamation. Closing the short distance and wrapping his arms around the other in a tight hug, he buried his face into the junction between head and shoulder.

"I'm sorry." He repeated, again and again, the words nearly obscured by his position. His eyes watered.

Arms encircled him, and he felt the weight of another body learn into his. A sniffling could be heard.

He was alive.

Kaneki cried.

Nothing was over, but they could get better.

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><p><strong>AN<strong>: And I start another story. This was the result of a whim to try my hand at writing a romance. One with a healthy relationship between two incompatible characters. With their canon personalities. (Well, until character development starts happening.)

Hopefully, no one is too OOC.

School is eating up my time, so updates will be slow.


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